Non-legal subtypes in CardTypes.json

[patrickgaskill]

Version(s) tested against

MTGJSON 5.1.0+20210524

Description of Bug

CardTypes.json contains a number of types that aren't in the Comprehensive Rules:

• Creature types
  • Chicken -- From Robot Chicken, which is black bordered but Scryfall has as memorabilia: true
  • Head -- From Skull Saucer, a silver-bordered Unsanctioned card
  • Hornet -- From before the grand creature type update?
  • Reveler -- From those Theros challenge decks, I don't see a good way in Scryfall's JSON to filter this as not being a real card
  • Rukh -- From an old promo Rukh token
  • Wasp -- Maybe from old versions of The Hive?
  • Halfling and Ranger appear to come from spoilers which are okay
• Planeswalker types
  • Abian -- Abian, Luvion Usurper, a Mystery Booster playtest card
  • B.O.B. -- B.O.B. (Bevy of Beebles), a silver-bordered Unsanctioned card
  • Duck -- Personal Decoy, a Mystery Booster playtest card
  • Dungeon and Master -- Dungeon Master, a Heroes of the Realm promo card
  • Inzerva -- Inzerva, Master of Insights, as Heroes of the Realm promo card
  • Urza -- Urza, Academy Headmaster, a silver-bordered Unstable card

Other silver-bordered types like Donkey and Child aren't present, so it seems inconsistent.

This may be related to #485. I wonder if the best solution could be just parsing the actual comprehensive rules text file, and including all the non-rules types from other sources as an extra field in the file.

[ZeldaZach]

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I'm not sure if limiting ourselves to "Real Magic" only is necessarily correct. These types are types given to card(s) in Magic's history, which leads the discussion on why am I to decide what should I arbitrarily support? It's worked the same for so long now, that a change might be undesired by downstream (& upstream) sources.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I do like how everything is properly listed and someone doesn't have to sort around a bunch of files to realize Urza is infant a planeswalker type, albeit silver border.

[patrickgaskill]

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I do like how everything is properly listed and someone doesn't have to sort around a bunch of files to realize Urza is infant a planeswalker type, albeit silver border.

This is sort of my point, that while using just CardTypes.json I can't tell which types are legal in Comprehensive Rules land, and which aren't.

I'm trying to build an app that has some very light rules simulation (imagine a dropdown where you choose a creature type to name for Cavern of Souls) so I'd love to have an easy way to get to game-legal-only types.

How would you feel about adding a version of CardTypes.json, like CompRulesCardTypes.json, that only includes things that are in the Comprehensive Rules?

[ZeldaZach]

Coming back to this, do you still find such a change/new file warranted? I'm still not necessarily convinced a change is necessary as having a full "enum" set of all potential values across all of MTGJSON does provide value, and removing certain ones or breaking the file interface to indicate some of those are "un" cards or special promos doesn't necessarily feel it's worth the effort.

[patrickgaskill]

I think so, and I largely stopped using MTGJSON because of it. If I'm presenting a non-acorn game state to the user, I need a list of non-acorn types to populate dropdowns and UI elements. It would definitely simplify my life to use MTGJSON as the source for that.